Is Utah's stalking statute too broad?

[00:00:00]One more complaint about Utah's stalking statute and the statutes that are written like it. I've had five or six cases in the last several years where the statute was used not as a shield as it was intended but as a sword where someone used it to attack someone or set someone up. The statute in Utah basically says if somebody engages in a course of conduct that causes emotional distress or causes someone to fear for their safety reasonably, then that constitutes stalking. That's way too broad and includes a whole different set of actions that we didn't intend to be defined as stalking. Can we please focus on writing criminal statutes that are directly targeted at the exact conduct that we intend to prohibit rather than trying to capture everything because if we write a statute that's just so broad that hundreds of things that we don't think of as criminal are now defined as criminal, we're just giving more and more power to the government, putting more and more power in the hands of those who want to abuse the criminal statutes rather than be protected by them.